The Women's Room

by Marilyn French

  What had happened to those people? Surely they were not now in this room, encased in this utterly different flesh, the vibrant triumphant girl, the yearning sensitive boy. All of life had constricted for them into a mortgage payment. Was that it? Had simple physical survival been so difficult for them that any other kind was a luxury? Was she, who felt herself to be miraculously still living, simply luckier? There was no question that survival of the spirit depended upon survival of the flesh: but hardship did not kill all its victims. Or did it? Was their hardship so hard? Was it perhaps the way they had conceived of life, of their duty, of their expectations? Yet, going over in her mind what their acts had been, and the space they had to move in, she could fault them on nothing. They had not had enough room. And now, it was not just what they had become that was oppressive, but that they would not allow that anyone could become anything else. That’s the price, she could hear Val saying, that’s the price they exact for having paid too much themselves. What had they wanted? To serve tea from a silver pot on an embroidered cloth just as nice as Mrs Carrington’s of the Bellview Carringtons? The silver tea set was covered with plastic, standing unused inside the china closet. To rise in society. Yes. Which required certain objects, certain manners. They had risen. They had reached the heights. They were now the old society of Bellview, the Carringtons and their friends having long since left it for Paris, Palm Beach, Sutton Place. The old Carrington mansion was now a private school, the Miller place a home for the aged.

  Her parents rose the moment the news reporter said, ‘Good night,’ and turned off the set and turned to her and said, ‘Good night, Mira.’ And she stood too and embraced them, really embraced them, not giving the usual polite peck of a kiss. They were surprised, and both of them stiffened a little. They smiled at her, her father shyly, sweetly, her mother with a certain vividness. But her mother could only say, ‘Don’t stay up too late now, will you, dear?’ and her father, ‘You’ll remember to turn the thermostat down, won’t you, Mira?’ Then they went up to their dreams.

  8

  The Wards had always ‘had Christmas’ early Christmas morning: a quick unwrapping which was followed by Mrs Ward’s wild flurries in the kitchen aimed at producing a dinner by midafternoon. Later everyone would sit, stuffed and lethargic, in the living room. Some man or other – it could only be a man – might snooze for a while. The others would chat until eight, when turkey sandwiches and coffee would be brought out, food taking up the slack in the conversation. Mira’s divorce and the necessity of splitting the boys with their father on the holidays had caused a break in this tradition, a break her parents had not yet accepted and which never went unremarked.

  Now they had a little party on Christmas Eve, inviting part of the family ‘so the boys will at least know their family,’ Mrs Ward would say, swallowing her pain. The boys would leave before midafternoon the next day and so miss Mrs Ward’s Christmas dinner. She invited the rest of the family to come then to help her get through the unnatural event.

  Mira met the boys at the bus station. They understood the decorum, and were combed, jacketed, and tied, although their hair was getting a little long. They were lively enough in the car, but as soon as they walked into the Ward house, they became more subdued, even stiff. Pecked kisses all around, exchange of traffic information, weather reports, polite inquiries about school. They settled down with Cokes in the living room, and Mira said, ‘Wait till you see what I bought!’

  She ran upstairs and dressed quickly. With Val’s help, she had bought a brilliant green and blue dashiki. She slipped it over her pants, neglecting to wear a bra. She laid brilliant blue eye shadow on her upper lids, making her eyes even bluer, and she hung enormous gold dangling earrings from her ears. They hurt, but she gritted her teeth. I want to tell them something, she said fiercely to herself. I want to tell them who I am. For the family, she knew, would be dressed as usual: the men in dark suits, white shirts, and red and blue, or red and gold, or blue and gold striped silk ties; the women in three-piece knit suits and teased, sprayed hair, and high heels matching their purses. A daring one might appear in a knit pantsuit.

  She came down the steps as if she were making an appearance, and stood, grinning, before her sons. They grinned back. ‘You look nice,’ Clark said. ‘Where’d you get that thing, anyway?’ Norm asked, sounding irritated, and when she did not answer, he pursued it. ‘Did you get it at that little store on Mass Ave near the place that sells bowls? On Brattle Street?’ He really wanted to know. ‘Why?’ she asked him finally. He looked shamefaced. ‘Well, they have them for guys too, don’t they?’

  ‘You mean you want one?’

  He shrugged. ‘Well, maybe.’

  Mrs Ward’s eyebrows went up as she surveyed her daughter, but then she smiled a little. ‘Well, it’s different,’ she admitted. Mr Ward said something about Mira looking as if she had come from Africa, but after shaking his head a little, he subsided.

  The Wards’ small house had a narrow porch in the front, separated from the living room by folding glass doors. To keep the mess down, they stood the artificial Christmas tree out there, placing it on a wooden settee that stood beneath the front windows. The presents were strewn on the settee around the tree. The room held only the settee and a slant-doored secretary. The living room sparkled with wax and clean ashtrays, so when Mira wanted to talk to the boys, she led them out to the porch, carrying an ashtray, and they all sat on the floor. Mira called out to her mother that she would do all the vegetables in an hour, after she’d visited with her sons. But Mrs Ward, tight-lipped, stood in the kitchen peeling and chopping. Mr Ward had gone down to the basement to ready the whoopee room (as they called it) for visitors. Mira knew that this, this sitting on the floor filling the rooms with cigarette smoke before company was expected, was an act of defiance, and angered them. But she refused to give in.

  Norm and Clark seemed much older than they had in the summer. They talked easily now, telling her about someone’s funny error in a soccer game, a martinet math teacher, some guys who sneaked beer into the dorm. Norm said he wanted to have a long talk with her about college: his father insisted he go to a good pre-med school, and become a doctor. But he didn’t want to be a doctor. The problem was he wasn’t sure whether he didn’t want to be a doctor because he didn’t want to be a doctor or because his father wanted him to be a doctor. Mira laughed and said he probably wouldn’t find out the answer to that in time. Clark wanted to tell Mira about an argument with his father that had confused him. As she listened, it became clear that Clark was perturbed because he’d shouted at his father. ‘He was yelling at me,’ he concluded sulkily. ‘I guess you’re allowed to have a temper too,’ Mira said, patting him. ‘Everybody else does.’ Norm had had an encounter with a Girl at a prep school mixer. He wanted to know if Girls were always like that. Mira got up and poured herself a gin and tonic.

  ‘Really, Mother, the boys and I will do the rest,’ she said, but Mrs Ward went on grimly peeling and chopping. Mrs Ward hated to cook and blamed the world for the necessity of her doing it.

  She returned to the porch and the three of them talked and laughed. She told them about the parties; she told them about the change in Iso. They were fascinated, they asked question after question. They wanted to know, clamorously, what women did with women, men with men. They told her rumors at school about fags; they told her jokes and stories they had heard but did not understand. They asked, a little warily, how one could tell if one was gay. Mira had never seen them as interested in anything before, and she pondered the subject’s fascination.

  ‘Val thinks everybody’s gay and straight, but that we get conditioned, most of us, to be one or the other early in life. Iso thinks that’s not true, that she was always only gay. I don’t know, I don’t think anybody knows. When you think about it, it doesn’t seem terribly important – I mean, what does it matter who you love? Except that I guess it causes identity problems. But that happens anyway, doesn’t it?’

  They were
mystified.

  ‘Well, you are both so fascinated by this. You’re wondering what you’re like, aren’t you?’

  ‘Well, there’s this guy, Bob Murphy, Murph, and he’s really a great guy, he’s a terrific soccer player and just a great kid, you know, and everybody likes him a lot, and I do too, sometimes my heart fills up looking at him, and everybody’s always touching him, you know, in the locker room and all? Always patting him on the back or poking him in the arm. He just laughs, but one day some guy – a real jerk, Dick his name is, said we were a bunch of queers. Do you think that’s true?’

  ‘I think you all love him. Do you think it’s peculiar that I love Val and Iso?’

  ‘No, but you’re a lady.’

  ‘Do you think ladies and men have different feelings?’

  They shrugged. ‘Do they?’ Norm asked suspiciously.

  ‘I doubt it,’ she smiled and got to her feet. ‘Come on.’ Mrs Ward had given up trying to make them feel guilty and had gone upstairs to dress. Mira and the boys went into the kitchen. She made herself another drink, offered them one – which led to hysterical giggling – and they talked on. She peeled and chopped while they set the table, fished down platters from high shelves, stirred the cream sauce, fetched vinegar from the pantry, laughed, talked.

  ‘The older guys in my class – some of them are older, and some of them just seem older, you know? They’re always talking about booze and broads, booze and broads,’ Norm imitated a deep male voice. ‘You think they really do those things?’

  ‘What things?’

  ‘Oh, you know, with girls and all.’

  ‘I don’t know, Norm, what do they say they do?’

  ‘Well, screwing and all,’ he said with a red face. The tension in the kitchen was high. She could hear them waiting for her answer.

  ‘Maybe some of them do,’ she said slowly. ‘And some of them probably make it up.’

  ‘That’s what I think!’ Norm exploded. ‘It’s just all lies.’

  ‘That could be. But say some of them are really screwing.’ Mira heard her father’s step descending the staircase. ‘You have to figure they don’t know much about what they’re doing, and are just as scared and uptight as you are. They’re no doubt clumsy. To hear Val talk, a lot of them stay clumsy.’

  Mr Ward was in the hall leading to the kitchen.

  ‘They say girls like it,’ Norm frowned. ‘They say girls want to.’

  ‘Maybe some of them do. But most of the them are probably pretending. Sex doesn’t come naturally to many of us. Not in this world. Maybe back when people lived on farms, I don’t know.’

  Mr Ward’s step veered quickly in the other direction and disappeared into the living room rug.

  The boys glanced toward the hall, then at their mother. They blushed, they giggled silently, holding their hands over their mouths. Mira stood smiling at them, yet grave.

  ‘Which is not to say that people aren’t sexual early,’ she continued imperturbably, turning back to peel a carrot. ‘I remember masturbating when I was fourteen.’

  They were silent at that, and she was standing at the sink with her back to them and could not see their faces. Norm came over to her and laid his hand lightly on her back. ‘Do you want me to pour the water out of the onions, Mom?’

  The family arrived at six on the dot, all of them at once. There were Mrs Ward’s sister and brother and their three grown children and two spouses and five grandchildren, and Mr Ward’s brother and his wife and one of their grown children with her husband and their three kids. After the briefest of greetings, the small children were shunted downstairs to the whoopee room, which Mr Ward had built for these occasions alone, to watch TV or play Ping-Pong or darts. The adults crowded into the living room and Mr Ward served them manhattans. Only Mira drank anything else. Clark and Norm went downstairs for a while, but came back up within half an hour and sat on the fringes of the room. No one seemed to notice, but it did not matter. The conversation was entirely proper: sex was not mentioned once.

  Other things were, however. Mira was not sure whether she had never really listened to them before, whether they had changed, or whether her being at Harvard gave a focus to their attacks. People seemed very upset these days. These people, familiar aunts, uncles, cousins, seemed united in a most virulent hatred. They talked with outraged contempt about drug addicts and hippies, about ungrateful spoiled kids who grew beards and long hair and did not appreciate their parents’ sacrifices. Jews seemed to have become more evil than ever in the past year or two, but they did not occupy center stage anymore. It was the niggers. When Mira complained, that was changed to the coloreds. They, the coloreds and the hippies and the war protesters, were ruining the country. ‘They’ were getting in everywhere; ‘they’ got scholarships to colleges while poor Harry, who earned only $35,000 a year, had to pay to send his children to college. And then, when the coloreds and the hippies got in, not on merit, you can be sure of that, they tried to overturn the school. Harvard kids were the worst. They were the most privileged group of kids ever known, and still they complained. ‘We’ had to work for what we got; ‘we’ didn’t get anything and didn’t dare to protest; but ‘they’ were still unsatisfied.

  Mira listened. She tried to muster arguments against them, although she saw bits of truth in what they said.

  ‘You can’t judge them by the standards of a past world,’ she said, but they leaped on her in fury. Those standards were eternal. Hard work, frugality, suppression of desire: that was the recipe for success and success was goodness and virtue. And one stayed faithful to one’s wife, and one made one’s mortgage payments, and one created a semblance of order because if one did not, the world would fall apart.

  ‘Do you know,’ asked a cousin, a woman almost Mira’s age, married and with three children, ‘the students in my school, the Negro students – there are all of ten of them in a school of two hundred and thirty – had the gall to ask the principal for a course in Black Studies? Can you imagine? I was flabbergasted! As soon as I heard it – and that idiot of a principal, he was thinking about giving it to them! – I marched right down to his office and said that if they could have a course in Black Studies, I wanted to give a course in English-Irish Studies! If they could have theirs, I want mine!’

  ‘That’s pretty much what they’ve gotten up until now,’ Mira said, but her cousin did not hear.

  ‘And the teacher in the room down the hall from me is French. I told him she could give a course in French Studies! Hah! How would he like that? Sixth graders learning that sort of thing!’

  ‘What sort of thing?’

  ‘Well, for heaven’s sakes, Mira, she’s French!’ She glanced around the room and saw the boys. ‘You can imagine!’ she said, with a sarcastic smile.

  It went on like that. Through dinner and afterwards, it went on like that. Mira probed her memory: had it always been like this? At some point in the evening, she poured herself a rye on the rocks. Norm was pouring Coke for himself, and noticed.

  ‘Switching drinks?’

  ‘I can’t seem to get drunk enough on gin and tonic.’

  ‘Why don’t you have a brandy?’

  ‘That’s for later. For sitting up late with.’

  ‘Can I have some tonight? If we stay up late?’

  ‘Sure,’ she smiled, and slipped her arm around his waist. He put his around her shoulders, and they stood there for a time.

  They did stay up late, long after everyone had left. They each had a brandy snifter, although the boys had only a drop each and did not like it and were soon gulping Coke again. Mira asked them, was it me, or were they worse this year?

  They didn’t know. Apparently all three of them had been not listening all these years. Mira blasted her family. She took their politics apart and damned them, she blasted their bigotry. The boys listened. When she asked for their opinions, they did not have any, not even on bigotry. They knew, they explained, that prejudice was supposed to be bad, but they heard it everyw
here they went. And they knew scarcely any Jews, and no blacks at all, so how could they judge?

  ‘I mean, it sounds crazy,’ Clark explained. ‘But I don’t know. Maybe black people really are what they say. I know you say all that’s not true, and I believe you, but I don’t know. For myself I don’t know.’

  Mira shut her mouth. ‘Yes,’ she said finally. ‘You’re right. Of course. You have to wait until you know for yourselves.’

  But the boys had other complaints. There had been so much hate. They had never before seen so much hate, so much anger.

  ‘She was so bitter.’

  ‘He seemed so mad.’

  ‘Is he that mad all the time?’

  ‘Does Uncle Harry always sound that way?’

  They gave her a new perspective. She thought of all those faces, faces she had known since childhood, faces she never thought of in terms of beauty or lack of it, and which she never looked at anymore, never tried to see the character under the familiar. But as the boys spoke, she saw them again: hard, lined, angry faces, with deep bitter lines, eyes furiously popping out of heads, mouths tight and hateful. And she remembered her first days at Harvard, looking in the mirror and noticing the bitter thin scar of her mouth.

  ‘Do I look like them?’ she asked her sons with a trembling voice.

  They hesitated. Her heart constricted. She knew they would find a way to tell her the truth.

  ‘You used to,’ Norm said. ‘But you got fatter.’

  She wailed. It was true.

  ‘You got softer,’ Clark said. ‘I mean your face is like – rounder.’

  Her vanity would not let it pass. ‘I look fat?’

  ‘No!’ they both insisted. ‘Really, no. Just … rounder,’ Clark repeated, searching for words.

  ‘Your mouth isn’t so hurt,’ Norm said, and she raised her eyes to him.

  ‘My mouth looked hurt?’

  He shrugged. He felt incompetent. ‘Yeah, sort of. You looked as if you had to be mad or otherwise you’d cry.’